Bitter Waters...

Bitter Waters...

A couple months ago I heard an author interviewed on npr, and couldn't talk myself out of buying his book. It was one of those "I can't not buy this" moments. (Blame Joe.)

Buried in Bitter Waters is Elliot Jaspin's amazingly thorough history of racial cleansing in America.

What did you say?

Racial cleansing?

America?

Whoa... Hold on... That crap happens only in far off places like Darfur and Bosnia and Rwanda. Primitive places. Not the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Sorry.

Jaspin documents about a dozen cases where the black population was driven out of entire counties between 1860 and 1930. In all of these cases, blacks have been kept out ever since. He estimates that this may have happened in as many as 260 counties. He estimates that this kind of cleansing may have happened in as many as 1800 cities and towns.

The stories are, without exception, brutal and appalling.

The term racial cleansing is controversial. He walks you through that debate, and I come out agreeing with him.

One of the most fascinating chapters is the story of how his own newspaper chain - Cox - almost completely buried the story because one its papers, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, came under fire by Jaspin for complicity in covering up racism.

The disturbing question for me is what about my home town? Two of the cases in the book are from Central and Southern Indiana. I remember reading of an attempted lynching as recently as the mid-30s down in Marian area - just an hour and a half away. (My Dad used to say that Indiana was the only southern state North of the Mason Dixon.)

Up until a few years ago, Goshen was a whites-only town. At some point in our history we had a sundown law. A friend saw this in action: when he was a student in the early 60s a black activist came to speak at GC. The college was told by the police chief that this woman couldn't stay in Goshen overnight! Another friend told me of recently working with a black colleague in Elkhart. The colleague was nervous about meeting my friend at her home in Goshen because she didn't think the town was safe.

This is my town! How can it not be safe?

Ummm... I'm white.

Oh.

Yeah.

What preceded the sundown law? When was it enacted? When was it repealed? Was there any kind of forced migration? Are we one of the 1,800?

One of Jaspin's themes is that we have collectively blotted this out of our memories. Whites are ashamed of their actions (and in denial of our own racism) and blacks are ashamed because of the abuse.

Trying to forget doesn't help. And it's not out there, or back then. We gotta start talking about it.